Hands On Projects and Problem Solving Questions

Discussion of practical projects and side work you have built or contributed to across domains. Candidates should be prepared to explain their role, architecture and design decisions, services and libraries chosen, alternatives considered, trade offs made, challenges encountered, debugging and troubleshooting approaches, performance optimization, testing strategies, and lessons learned. This includes independent side projects, security labs and capture the flag practice, bug bounty work, coursework projects, and other hands on exercises. Interviewers may probe for how you identified requirements, prioritized tasks, collaborated with others, measured impact, and what you would do differently in hindsight.

EasyTechnical

65 practiced

List the core stages of a CI pipeline you configured for a project (build, lint, unit/integration tests, artifact publishing, deployment). Provide an example YAML snippet (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkinsfile) that runs tests and caches dependencies, and explain your caching strategy and failure handling.

HardSystem Design

56 practiced

Design Terraform governance for an organization adopting infrastructure-as-code: module design and reuse, remote state backend and locking strategy, workspace isolation per environment, secrets handling, policy-as-code enforcement (OPA/Conftest), CI/CD integration, and an onboarding plan for teams.

HardSystem Design

68 practiced

You need to optimize distributed tracing costs while keeping fidelity for debugging. Compare head-based and tail-based sampling, explain adaptive sampling strategies, propose how to keep full traces for errors or slow requests, and how to correlate sampled traces with metrics and logs for alerts.

HardSystem Design

73 practiced

Design an SSO migration for several internal applications that currently use different auth schemes. Compare OAuth2/OIDC and SAML options, specify token lifetimes and refresh token handling, service-to-service auth strategies, a phased migration plan, rollback capabilities, and how to validate access correctness post-migration.

MediumSystem Design

64 practiced

Outline an incremental plan to split a monolith into microservices focused on tooling and implementation: repository separation or monorepo patterns, CI/CD changes for multiple services, database migration and ownership patterns, service discovery, API contracts, and success metrics for each extraction.

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